"With my contract up at the end of the season we kind of knew of another opportunity that was around the corner and from a scheduling standpoint it probably wasn't going to work out," Dedes said Wednesday. "I wanted to stay and have both gigs. They gave me a certain degree of schedule flexibility, but in order to do what I needed to do I was going to need more and they just weren't going to give it to me, which I completely understood from their perspective.

"It was an opportunity to take the next step nationally. It just basically came to a fork in the road."

Dedes, a Fordham alumnus who previously had called Lakers games, declined to say what his new job will be, but he has done extensive work on pro and college games for CBS.